THE NURTURING ECONOMY
So, at a juncture when not just America but the world is crying out for a new economics, what have we learned? And how can this learning help us design a system that reflects nurturing rather than exploitative values?
The first thing we learn from America’s experience is that borrowing to consume is unnatural. The body, for example, only has so many energy resources. Any new “investment”—repair of infrastructure or creation of new cells—must be done with available cash (food being digested) or savings (fat and nutrients stored in the body).
That’s why animals do not reproduce if they’re not sufficiently nourished. How do we know? Well, consider that when young women who are anorexic reach a certain level of malnutrition, their periods stop. It’s nature’s way of saying that unless you “pay for” your body’s current operating expenses, there are no savings available to manufacture a new being. The second important learning—the really good news, in fact—is that on this planet, the source of all wealth is the energy from the sun, and the food from the earth. All else is derivative. And this is really great news because both of these resources—understood and managed properly—are infinitely renewable. As sure as the sun comes up in the morning, solar power is available, either “new” or “used.” As Thom Hartmann pointed out in his book of the same title, the oil we are burning today—in ever-dwindling supply—represents “the last hours of ancient sunlight.” And while we may be running out of stored sunlight, there is an abundance of fresh stuff coming our way daily. Says Dennis Hayes, former director of the U.S. Solar Energy Research Institute, says, “No country uses as much energy as is contained in the sunlight that strikes its buildings each day.”
Because the sun also controls atmospheric dynamics, wind energy too is “solar,” and—as long as the sun comes to work every morning—renewable as well. According to a 1997 U.S. Department of Energy report, three states—North Dakota, Kansas, and Texas—had “enough harnessable wind energy to satisfy national electricity needs.” However, according to Lester Brown, that was a “misunderestimation” based on technology that existed in the 1990s. Advances in wind turbine designs now indicate that wind power in just these three states could meet America’s entire national energy demand.
Furthermore, energy consultant Harry Braun suggests that because these wind turbines are so similar to auto engines, Detroit’s auto industry could regear to mass-produce these on an assembly line. This could drop the cost of wind-generated electricity two cents a kilowatt hour! Lester Brown suggests that by shifting current energy industry subsidies—e.g., the current $210 billion yearly fossil fuel subsidies—this new technology can be developed.3
What stand in the way of this development are the same things that have kept the dominator economy in place long since it’s outlived its uselessness: (1) An influential and powerful minority benefits from it; (2) The vast majority of the rest of us have been myth-led to believe that this is the way things have always been and always must be.
Part of what has kept the current economic system in place is the persistent belief in scarcity. With 6.5 billion people on the planet, how could we possible grow enough food for all? The answer is simple and natural. The goal is for each community everywhere to be sustainable, and food and energy self-sufficient. If the sun and soil are the sources of all wealth, then a healthy, wealthy commonwealth begins with every community having access to this abundance. On one end of the spectrum, it means the end of exploitive monoculture economies where resources are extracted without the proper payment, and local sustainable farming is marginal at best. On the other end—in the most urbanized and ghettoized areas of our country—food must be grown locally, as a thriving business opportunity. Consider the empty lots in cities like Philadelphia and Detroit, and the possibilities for growing food and sending it up the economic food chain as this food is sold, processed, and delivered.
If we’ve learned anything from people’s capitalism and the laws of biology it is that when “cells” are allowed to thrive, the entire organism thrives. Those top-down attempts to force collectivism have been miserable failures. However, when individuals cooperate together voluntarily, and when they are allowed to gain a fair price for their labor, communities thrive and the commonwealth builds. The body cares for all participating cells, and so participation is key.
REGROWING YOUR GARDEN
How, then, do I participate and regrow my garden?
Once again, rather than answers we offer more questions for us each to ask ourselves: What is it that truly brings me happiness? What is of value, and what is worth having? Each time “I want” comes up, the next question is, And if I had that, what would it do for me? What beliefs are keeping my status quo in place? What fears or concerns? How can I downscale my footprint and upscale my life? How can I use less and at the same time increase my happiness? This is tricky because there is such a persistent invisible belief in sacrifice and deprivation. So the game is, whatever you choose must not just make your footprint smaller, but must make your life better. Self-fulfillment is far more satisfying than selfish feel-fullment.
How can I educate myself, and help educate others? In a world where we are increasingly seeing that all things are related, we can no longer discount things that are out of our comfort zones, whether those involve economics, politics, or spirituality. In these wildly transformational times, we might do better embracing our “discomfort zone” so we become more comfortable with the discomfort of change.
As we allow the “myth-perceptions” of obsolete economic thinking to fall by the wayside, we can recognize how all systems—economy, ecology, banking, health care, education, defense—are really one conversation: how do we, individually and collectively, use our resources wisely for the well-being of all? Why? Because in a healthy, caring system a “health care system” requires a fraction of the resource it currently uses, because prevention is far cheaper than cure. And that brings us to a final lesson we can learn from the natural economy. Just as surely as international capitalism (corporatism) is proving itself incapable of delivering us into a healthy new world, the same is true of state capitalism (i.e., communism). In a natural economy based on extraction, production, and distribution of real (renewable) resources, the forms of organization likewise arise from the grassroots up. Consider that in villages and rural communities the world over, some form of barn raising is commonplace. Independent entities (in this case, farmers) recognize their interdependence, and combine voluntarily to assist one another.
The future of economics, not to mention our species, involves growing a noncoercive, nongovernmental public movement of voluntary cooperation that will weave all the functional and productive aspects of economy into a true web of mass-construction that will make us all interdependently wealthy. This is already happening via the slow money movement, Transition Towns, and buy local alliances. These alliances often transcend old political polarities, and combine the most functional aspects of libertarian conservatism and progressive liberalism. Regardless of what this new economic system is called, it will involve two things: wisely using the resources of nature, and wisely using the resources of human nature. In order to maximize the renewable original wealth of the sun and earth, we will need to mobilize and apply the unique gifts our species brings to the world: love and imagination. Through imagination, we create sustainable technology. Through love, we multiply the goodness throughout the system so that we need fewer goods to feel good. We recognize that the most sustainable form of economic growth is growing happiness.
May we grow happier, as we embrace our mission to tend the garden we have been given, and fruitfully multiply the “common wealth” instead of fruitlessly scrapping over the scraps.
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TOWARD A SPIRITUAL ECONOMICS
AMIT GOSWAMI
It does not take a genius to see that capitalist economics as practiced today is at a crisis point. Present-day capitalism is based on continuous growth and expansion that re
quire unlimited resources; this cannot be sustained on a finite planet. (In fact, the finitude of resources may already have caught up with us.) This expansion produces higher and higher standards of living, and wages cannot keep up without producing inflation. To meet the demands of higher standards and their higher cost, people are forced to give up their other needs, such as the need of children for quality time with a parent or the need of adults for leisure time to pursue meaning. Thus, and invariably, some of the basic promises of capitalism are shortchanged by the nature of the beast itself.
Capitalism recognizes one basic need for people: the survival and security of their physical bodies. This basic ego need requires private property—and any economics that ignores this basic need of people is bound to fail. But as the psychologist Abraham Maslow pointed out, we have an entire hierarchy of needs beyond the body. One major defect of capitalist economics is the ignoring of the people’s higher needs. Following Maslow, but modifying his theory according to the insights of my general approach to spirituality—science within consciousness—we can easily see what these higher needs are.
OUR REDEFINED HIGHER NEEDS AND THE RUDIMENTS OF A SPIRITUAL ECONOMICS
Consciousness is the foundation of all being, and its possibilities are fourfold: material (which we sense); vital energy (which we feel, primarily through the chakras and secondarily through the brain); mental meaning (which we think); and supramental (which we intuit). “Supramental” includes discriminating contexts, such as physical laws, as well as contexts of meaning and feeling, such as ethics, love, and aesthetics. The material aspects of experience are sometimes called “gross”; the rest make up the “subtle” domain of our experience.
When consciousness chooses the actual event of its experience out of these possibilities (material, vital, mental, and supramental), the physical has the opportunity to represent the subtle. The material is like computer hardware; the subtle is software. Our capacity for making material or physical representation of the subtle evolves. Our capacity for making representations of the vital evolved through the evolution of life via more and more sophisticated organs to represent living functions such as maintenance and reproduction. Next, the capacity of making more and more sophisticated representations of the mental evolved. This is the stage of evolution we are in right now. Our capacity effortlessly to represent the supramental has not evolved yet. However, there is evolutionary pressure on us to move in this direction; it is the primary reason some of us are attracted to spirituality.
In this way, there must be an urge to satisfy not only physical needs but also the needs of all the other dimensions of our experience. Thus a spiritual economics must address the satisfaction of emotional needs both conditioned and unconditioned (positive emotions such as love, compassion, and satisfaction itself); the pursuit of meaning, including the pursuit of new mental meaning that requires creativity; and the pursuit of spiritual and supramental (soul) needs such as altruism, aesthetics, and happiness.
And in truth, this ladder of needs is not entirely hierarchical. If one satisfies higher needs, the urge to satisfy lower needs actually decreases. But if a lower need is satisfied, the demand for satisfying a higher need increases. In this way, a strategy for an economics more suitable than capitalism would be to address all of our needs simultaneously.
Whereas capitalism is an economics of physical well-being based on the satisfaction of our conditioned physical ego-needs, idealist or spiritual economics must be an economics of holistic well-being based on the satisfaction of both our (physical) ego needs and higher needs (pertaining to the exploration of the vital, mental, soul, and spirit).
MICROECONOMICS OF THE SUBTLE
Economics is about production and consumption, supply and demand, prices and so forth. How does all of this relate to our subtle needs? Let’s talk about these micro-details.
Production of positive vital energy can be accomplished in many ways: forestation (plants and trees have abundant vital energy), cultivating positive health in society (people of positive health radiate vital energy), and so forth.1 But the best way to ensure production of vital energy is to encourage ordinary workplaces to offer facilities for their employees to practice positive health, including space for yoga, tai chi, and meditation. As for production of mental meaning, we already have some things in place in the arts and entertainment industries. Both of these industries have the capacity to produce positive vital energy (positive emotions); however, they have largely been bogged down with the negativity of a materialist culture. But we can shift the emphasis from negativity to meaningfulness and positivity.
The production of supramental and spiritual energy requires more effort today than it used to. In the olden days, spiritual organizations like churches, temples, synagogues, mosques, and the like cultivated and produced supramental and spiritual intelligence in their leaders and practitioners. Nowadays, these organizations are more interested in influencing mundane politics than in investing in the supramental. But make no mistake about it; it can be done, although we may have to develop new spiritual organizations to do it. In the olden days, perhaps the most effective means of production (and dissemination) of supramental energy were travelling monks (called sadhus in India; troubadours are an example in the West). This we can revive; to some extent the many new age conferences on spirituality are already serving this purpose. Also effective are group meditations, through which (as some of parapsychologist Dean Radin’s experiments show) people can experience nonlocal consciousness and hence can take creative leaps to the supramental domain. This can be done even in workplaces.
Now to the question of consumption. Because the vital and mental are mappable in us, they can be consumed both by local and nonlocal means. For example, if we see good theater, it cultivates the processing of meaning in us, even new meaning. When we partake of good, meaningful entertainment, we also feel positive emotions; we are consuming them. As we consume, we ourselves have the potential to become producers.
Supramental energy consumption is nonlocal, but it requires local triggers. There are scientists who subscribe to the so-called Maharishi effect, according to which the spiritual and supramental energy generated by a group meditation is consumed automatically in the local vicinity. There have been claims of crime reduction in big cities where Transcendental Meditation groups perform such meditation. However, this is controversial and I am not advocating it. A purely quantum-mechanical consumption of your spiritual energy requires that I be correlated with you by some means or other. For example, experiments by Mexican neurophysiologist Jacobo Grinberg suggest that if two people practice meditative intention together, they become so correlated—but it should be simpler than that. There are many anecdotes of people who have felt peace in the presence of a sage (I myself have experienced this). So just being locally present may trigger consumption.
The best part of the story of subtle energy products is that it is mostly free. The subtle dimensions have no limits; we can consume a sage’s love all we wish, and the supply is not going to diminish. There is no zero-sum game in the subtle. Since there might be a bit of material cost of production, we might put a material price tag on subtle products to offset this—and that may not be such a bad idea, because it enables people to be more serious about their intentions when they consume subtle products. This would also be an opportunity for the government to subsidize the subtle industry, for example, in the form of tax exemption or research grants.
DOES SPIRITUAL ECONOMICS SOLVE THE PROBLEMS OF CAPITALISM?
But how can spiritual economics—the economics of the subtle—address the problems of capitalism I articulated earlier? First, let’s look at the problem of limited resources. Capitalistic growth economics depends crucially on keeping consumer demands going; this is often accomplished by creating artificial physical needs, such as new annual fashions for women’s garments. It is very wasteful and detrimental to finite resources.
In spiritual economics, when people’s higher needs
are met—even partially—their physical needs reduce, reducing the demand for consumption and thus reducing the wastage of limited material resources. The economy still expands—but in the higher planes, where resources are unlimited (there is no limit on love and satisfaction).
There is another, related problem with capitalism and material-expansion economics: environmental pollution. This is a tricky one. In the short term, production of pollution helps expand the economy by creating pollution cleanup sectors of the economy. Believe it or not, the Exxon Valdez oil spill disaster actually produced an economic boom in Alaska. But in the long run, environmental pollution on a finite planet is bound to end up with a doomsday of reckoning. Many environmentalists think that global warming has already reached doomsday criticality. In spiritual economics, material consumption is reduced, thus automatically reducing environmental pollution.
Next, let us consider the free market. Why isn’t it free in the way Adam Smith envisioned? The truth is, a really free market has large ups and downs—but a democratic government must level out these business cycles in order to survive; voters wouldn’t allow them to go unchecked. So the government intervenes, either through the Keynesian approach (tax the rich and increase government programs to increase jobs and economic movements) or the supply-side approach (reduce tax for the rich; the rich will invest, producing economic activity that will trickle down to the poor). If these steps require deficit financing, so be it. Now, nothing is wrong with government intervention per se. Adam Smith himself was quite aware of this: he suggested government intervention to reduce unjust income distribution, to ensure that the entry to the free market is really free even for the small entrepreneur (regulation against monopoly, for example), and to provide liberal education to everyone participating in the market. Governments today tinker with the free market in a few other ways that Adam Smith may not have approved of: they make bureaucratic regulations, bail out big companies from bankruptcy, and give tax incentives to segments of the economy counter to the spirit of capitalism. The problem with this kind of tinkering is the indefinite-growth economics that we seem to have become stuck on. I have already commented on how spiritual economics solves this problem.
What Comes After Money Page 24